Greedy Goblin

Sunday, August 17, 2014

Weekend minipost: the coalition of Good

You might heard that several "pirate" alliances joined into a coalition called "Battlement". You can see that their mission statement, is pure Good. They don't fight for land or a nice killboard, just for the good of New Eden, to crush the Evil that corrupted this World, taking the control from pilots flying spaceships to liars plotting on some Jabber channel.

I'll obviously run some numbers, but it's a weekend minipost, so I merely welcome this turn of events. You can see that there are no coalition level finances, every alliance pays SRP for its own members. It makes Goon spying much less effective, as they can only steal the money of one alliance. I did and will keep financially support Mordus Angels, the strongest member of this coalition. We also cooked up something really nasty for the Evil Ones: the idea and the financing is mine (didn't want that 20B anyway), the execution is theirs. The results are already looking good, you'll see it at the end of August.

Finally I suggested to make a donation board for the coalition of Good. There are countless "carebears" who were abused by the evil Goons, they will surely jump on the idea that they can get their revenge on their tormentors by donating the fruits of "carebearing". It'll be up soonTM.

35 comments:

Anonymous
said...

You're behind the times, VFK is irrelevant to the goonies now, ya0 is the capital. And its named for your nemesis mynnna, in case anyone still thought he was just the meaningless money-pusher he likes to claim he is...

The CFC is optimized at one thing: huge number of F1-pushers. They crushed any enemy on the field.

I support guerilla-small gang against them. The line CFC member will be ganked so many times that he quits (hopefully CFC and not the game). So the CFC will be defeated without a single major combat, simply by losing too many members.

Major fleet engagements hasn't worked against CFC. Maybe asymmetric warfare will. Maybe it won't but it seems like a better plan than trying what has failed time and again. Regardless of the outcome it should be interesting to read about from the perspective of someone that doesn't have a dog in the fight on either side.

Well, i personally don't believe Goons are going to be gone from nullsec in a year. This can only become true if two things happen:1 - you are actually successful in hitting Goons for more damage than they earn2 - they are unable to adapt to this new challenge

I have no way to judge the speed at which Goons are capable of replenishing their ISK, so (1) is very much up in the air. But i honestly don't believe in (2).

Doesn't look particularly asymmetric, given their immediate goals are to take sov and moons... to do that they will need to form up on timers.

I predict that even if asymmetric warfare did prove effective that goons will simply move their individual isking to alt accounts and grind away in peace and harmony. I predict this will have little or no impact on their ability to make war. I predict that just for lolz they will hellcamp member corps of this coalition in and that they will be the ones to quit this folly. I predict effective use of spies to destabilise the internal organisational structure which what spies do, contrary to the contention that they are just there to go after SRP wallets.

Bottom line? wont work. It can't because it is predicated on a misunderstanding of how your enemy works and a misunderstanding of how the game works. All you are doing is providing content for the goons to make them keep on logging in.

@Maxim: - we don't have to break the income of GSF.- we don't have to break the income of the average Goon.- we just have to break the income of the median Goon.

If the little guys, the ones who want SRP for a T1 cruiser and who rat in a single Isthar or Naga are beaten out, the CFC can no longer field its signature 1000 Megas and the enemy sov-holders will be able to beat them on the field.

As long as the GSF (well, more so the CFC) have immense isk reserves and are running large isk prints, you cannot hope to put a dent in their war machine.

- we don't have to break the income of the average Goon.

The average goon represents the largest segment of the goons - not targeting them means the already farcical contention that targeting pilots makes a difference even more farcical because suddenly you are impacting an even smaller portion of the membership.- we just have to break the income of the median Goon.

Aaaaand it still wont work. Individual goons do not care for isk. They care for fights. They care for fun. They care for silly randian nerd rage that makes them laugh. You are giving them content. You are making them more likely to log in.

But even if they did want personal isk because somehow the alliance coffers are not enough to keep them in ships and fun - they'll just earn it on alts. And your attacks will make not a lick of difference...

So to clarify, MoA and co have realised that we were right and the only way to fight is to form a coalition? Good to know.

And i think your be surprised how rich the median goon is. If you did somehow manage to make them broke, the richer guys would fill it in. I guarantee though, you'll go broke before the median goon does.

@Anonymous: the Goons follow the same performance distribution as everyone else. 10% does 90% of the PvP: http://greedygoblin.blogspot.hu/2014/04/morlocks-and-eloi-not-so-bad-after-all.html So it's not a big leap to say 10% earn 90% of the ISK. The big thing about GSF is that they can keep the 90% busy who aren't much useful normally, but worth gold when they push F1 in pinnacle battles "the 1000 Megas". They are dumb even by Goon standards. Driving them away won't be hard, and while peace is on, they aren't missed either, the "elite" guys will handle everything. But when war comes with N3 or PL or HERO and rageping go out, there will be 300 caps/supers and no one in Celestises or Megas or Moas because we drove them out long ago.

@Lucas: you might noticed no coalition SRP, no coalition leader and only a handful of FCs. It's rather independent pirates bluing each other than a monolith like the real coalitions are.

@Anonymous: if they can't use CFC space, why would they bother defending it in bombless bombers. They might stay in CFC and join for fun ops, but they will no longer be loyal and donate their time to grinding.

@Gevlon"you might noticed no coalition SRP, no coalition leader and only a handful of FCs. It's rather independent pirates bluing each other than a monolith like the real coalitions are"That's how it starts. Right now they are blue and will help each other out, starting some coalition ops. As they grow, that will become common, until most of their ops are coalition level. Then they'll start to make income, but then... how does that get distributed? So the largest corps will form a council of directors to decide where that goes. Wealth distribution will lead out with replacing everyone's losses (so everyone stays on a fair level) then splitting out the spoils. The next thing you know, your watching a coalition of alliances like any other.

"but worth gold when they push F1 in pinnacle battles "the 1000 Megas". They are dumb even by Goon standards. Driving them away won't be hard, and while peace is on, they aren't missed either, the "elite" guys will handle everything."Of course it will. When they lose their battleships, they get more isk than it costs for a new one. Your idea to ruin the median goon actually makes them richer by distributing the wealth from the richest.

Meh. I'm a member of one of the alliances of this coalition, and I have to say I'm not really enjoying joining your holy crusade because the goon didn't welcome you in their main corp with a red carpet, vivas, rivers of milk and honey. While I do like blowing up goon ships I have litteraly nothing against them.

And now you've pushed for something I despis: huge and meaningless battles for crap moons and useless sovereignty structures, endless blue crosses all over the place. I was in an alliance doing extremely well in small gangs. Now this is about to be over because some random guy on the internet think he's a space pope and calls for a holy crusade for a grudge. I'm going to be a random guy no one knows in yet another blue donut. Awesome.

@CFC grunt: does the "pull of community" pays for his PLEX too or pays his subscription?

Also, the keyword is a "well set up ratter". Which is the top 5-10%. We can't touch that. But the rest will be massacred.

@Bob: I do not suggest large fleet ops to this coalition. I do the very opposite: http://greedygoblin.blogspot.hu/2014/08/full-july-cfc-killboard-analysis.html check the bottom paragraph and http://greedygoblin.blogspot.hu/2014/07/battle-size-analysis-properly-done.html whole post.

I really hope that this coalition remains a bunch of independent pirates flying small gang, just being blue so not killing each other.

@Gevlon"I really hope that this coalition remains a bunch of independent pirates flying small gang, just being blue so not killing each other."Have you read their SOTA?They already have a leadership chain in place, they are going over sov and moons, they are prioritising coalition fleets over independent fleets and want to work on coalition level income. They clearly aren't just being blue.

Each member has high ISK ratioWhich isn't entirely against goons. At some point someone will do or say something that someone else doesn't like and someone will shoot a blue and the coalition will crash. As much as I'd like to see a new coalition form, they simply don't have anyone that is powerful enough to lead and to guarantee the coalition continues if the groups start infighting. Goons are string enough that if one of the member groups split off due to a diplomatic issue, the others would have no incentive to split off with them. That's why you get things like the bastion forming up when the member alliances have problems.

Any plan of crushing the cfc by killing ratters is always going to fail. From what I see losing ratting ships is hardly cutting into the profit of the median goon. You don't see the same plots repeatedly losing ships very often and the number of kills compared to the number of ratters is insignificant - at best it is weeding out the less observant or able members.

"They have no reason to unblue each other. Each member has high ISK ratio, so turning on each other would naturally decrease it. Why fight another pirate when you can just farm Goonies?"

Because, as one of the members of Battlements said, half of them hate each other's guts.

Plus, there's a reason to fight another pirate... fights! Fights are a prized commodity. If you have a group that fields roughly the same numbers as you do and likes to fight - why blue them if you enjoy fights?

If you try to pick on a big coalition's sov, they'll blob you. If you stay under the radar, picking off an odd ratter and have a good time brawling other residents of NPC space - you can have pretty good time.

A lot of sov alliances (and even Goon groups, like Spaceviolence) do smaller fleets and like fights. Mind you, that would require Battlements to show up with something that's not bombers that cloak up when facing an inty gang.

you really have no idea how ratting in null works. an afk ishtar costs about 250 mill. it will make back its cost in about 4 hours of ratting. everything after that is profit. someone that keeps eve in the background while browsing the net or even at work (like me) can easily earn 2-3 billion per month afk ratting. nobody frets the loss of an ishtar. if pirates become a big enough problem for ratters then the simple solution is to concetrate ratting in fewer systems with active standing fleets and reshipping to pvp ships whenever hostiles come near. that sounds like content and fun to me, hardly a reason to quit.